This article was first published on 29 July 2025. 

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Variety is the spice of life and all that. Last Thursday I was at Channel 4, attending the premiere of porn star Bonnie Blue’s new documentary, followed by a Q&A with the woman herself. The next day I was in the Cotswolds to give an after-dinner speech at “Scrutopia”, the annual summer school run in memory of conservative philosopher Sir Roger Scruton. One of these events was much more fun than the other.

In the flesh, Bonnie — real name Tia Billinger — was burnished and svelte, giving every sign of being genuinely happy with the career that has made her millions. Her gimmick is to have sex on camera with what she calls “normal men”, not porn stars, then make subscribers pay to watch — and for six months, she has allowed the documentary-makers to follow her around. Gangbangs are her self-professed kink, including an infamous one in January allegedly involving 1,057 men in 12 hours. This proved too much for OnlyFans bosses, who refused to air the footage much to its star’s frustration. Instead, she has persuaded Channel 4 to show excerpts. The accompanying voiceover calls it “an unofficial world record”, as if waiting for Roy Castle to arrive with a certificate.

Along with journos and TV types, members of the Billinger family were in the audience for the screening, including her proud mum and gran. We all watched as their girl got penetrated by various portly naked men, touted for virgins at freshers’ fairs, and did jigsaws and crafting projects as downtime. “My brain works differently, I’m not emotional,” she says to camera at one point, and I believed her. Filmed at the end of her mass orgy, she lies down on the condom-strewn floor and does a comedy starfish.

I’m afraid I laughed. Blue/Billinger is quite funny in a Carry On Up the Algorithm sort of way. Asked during the Q&A whether she ever “hit the wall” during marathon sex sessions, she replied that “the only walls that get hit are mine”. She is good at bathetically juxtaposing the outrageous with the mundane: “I would love you to rearrange my insides somewhere near Oxford Circus”, goes a typical TikTok advert for one of her events. She also says she is looking for male participants whether they are “barely legal or barely breathing”, and that they should hide any wedding rings for the cameras.

With a cool business head, she explains that the provocation is deliberate: the more wives and mothers rant angrily about her, the more husbands and sons go searching for her online. Making money like this is far more fun than her previous job in finance recruitment for the NHS. Yet she also likes to think of her content as educative, teaching men to have better sex. “I am basically a community worker,” she declares somewhat implausibly, before masterminding a sex scene in a classroom. Frightened-looking young women, awkwardly dressed up in school uniforms, say that they hope their unpaid participation will drive more subscribers to their own tiny porn accounts.

Also involved in Thursday’s presentation were the Channel 4 backers, visibly confused about what sort of film they were promoting: heartwarming story of feminist empowerment or hollow-eyed nightmare. (On camera, Blue says it is the former: “If anything I’m the image of what you [feminists] have been asking for for years”.) The anxious commissioning editor got a laugh when he fulsomely thanked “Kirsty from legal”; while director Victoria Silver seemed to struggle with Blue’s cheerful sociopathy, switching incoherently in the Q&A between praise for female autonomy and sad head-shaking on behalf of her teenage daughter. At one point, she told the audience that “all of us” should “park” our judgemental responses to Bonnie: she’s just out there doing her thing.

But part of Blue’s thing is to resist others’ attempts at humanisation. At one point in the documentary, she gets banned from the OnlyFans platform altogether, for announcing that she next intends to film herself displayed in a clear glass box in central London, bound, gagged, and open to all-comers to penetrate as they wish. “Do you consider yourself an artist?” a pretentious American journalist asked her after the credits had rolled, perhaps keen to frame her as the new Marina Abramovic. Replied Blue with derision: “Oh my god, that’s far too intellectual a question; what is it you think you’ve just watched?” Another questioner noticed that some subscribers seemed to crave emotional connection, and asked her what men who paid to watch her might be “grateful for”. The frank answer came back: “my holes”.

We don’t really need to wonder what Roger Scruton would have thought about all of this, because in 1986 he wrote a book called Sexual Desire which told us. In it, he sketched a Platonic ideal of sexual arousal: of erotic desire involving mutual recognition and communication of pleasure between you and your partner, ecstatically directed towards an irreplaceable particular person in all their specificity, rather than towards a mere selection of body parts, or some pictures on a screen. Sexual desire in this ideal state is individualising, not objectifying; it is a “cooperative enterprise” between two people, discovering new aspects of the mysterious other; it is sacred and full of awe. It is the absolute opposite of hundreds of men standing in boxer shorts and balaclavas, waiting for a few seconds of bodily contact with a woman they have never met; or of thousands of spectators, home alone with credit cards out and flies unzipped.

Scruton — someone I knew a little through our shared interest in philosophical aesthetics — did not write from a religious point of view. His arguments in Sexual Desire were all secular. Still, he was very clear that sex is always a moral matter, and seemed confident that any sexual impulse falling short of his demanding interpersonal conception must be relegated to mere perversion. I used to find this endearingly idealistic, assuming that he had probably got an exaggerated idea of love’s redemptive power from listening to too much Wagner. Now though, I think he was probably right.

For while it seems clear that something has gone hideously awry with Bonnie Blue’s general approach to sexual matters, if you take modern morality at face value, then it’s hard to say exactly what. Was it when she passed a certain number of penetrations? Was it fine at 10 men, but not at 11? Would it have been better if she had spaced out the bodily collisions a bit, with a few hours between each? Or if she hadn’t filmed it for others to watch?

Faced with the unsatisfying arbitrariness of these proposals, Scruton’s more tempting answer beckons. Things went wrong the moment Blue decided to treat her fellow human beings as depersonalised objects, and to let them treat her like an object in turn. This was just as wrong the first time she did it, as the 1,000th. The awkward thing about this answer is not that it is unsatisfying; it is more the way it forces most of us to say “Je suis Bonnie Blue” too.

Contemporary theories of sexuality urge us to go beyond feelings of love and desire for particular special people to the “true”, more basic nature of sexual contact. They reduce sex between humans to a blind urge to reproduce genes, or to a repressed version of childhood attachments, or to animal lust untrammelled by civilising religious impulses, or whatever the modern story is. Via such narratives, we are supposed to think of human relationships as fruitfully extracted from the world of familiar subjective appearances, and given up to the pitiless objective gaze of the scientist, sexologist, or psychoanalyst, so that the “real” story can emerge about what we are doing when we long for another person.

But as Scruton saw, in trying to strip the world of enchanting sexual appearances to get to the supposedly real urges “underneath” the appearances, we just replace beautiful appearances with uglier disenchanted ones. As he wrote:

“… to see human beings as objects is not to see them as they are, but to change what they are, by erasing the appearance through which they relate to one another as persons… It is to create a new kind of creature, a depersonalised human being, in which subject and object drift apart, the first into a world of helpless dreams, the second to destruction.”

It’s almost as if he’d been watching Channel 4.

Having a lovely time around the dinner table at Scrutopia, I chatted to serious young men about expectations placed upon them. One of them brought up the dangerous practice of sexualised choking, made popular through exposure to violent porn. He said that, just like most women, most men don’t like it either, but sometimes feel they are expected to do it, and may even be reluctantly complying out of embarrassment. It seems like a horribly dark version of the Abilene paradox: nobody wants to go to Abilene, but everyone thinks everybody else wants to, so they all unhappily troupe there together. Except that this time, a woman is involuntarily strangled instead; and here too, it turns out nobody was ever having any fun.

Blue — who perhaps needless to say, is a big fan of being choked — would undoubtedly say this issue is to be solved by more vocal consent. It was a point she came back to repeatedly when questioned on Thursday night. But having to read out an ever-growing list of internet-approved acts you positively don’t want to participate in, every time you get into the bedroom, does not seem to me a liberating state of affairs for anyone. And for every future dead, strangled daughter who once watched a Bonnie Blue video — or whose sex partner did — it won’t be much consolation for her family to think she nominally had a choice.

Scruton was the sort of social conservative who positively fought for the beautiful and noble things in our culture, trying to safeguard their presence before they disappeared entirely. If the rest of us are too jaundiced to manage that, we should at least try to fight off the obviously ugly and degrading. OnlyFans has recently been valued at $8 billion. It’s all very well saying you won’t be looking into the abyss; either way, the abyss will end up looking into you. Do we really want to have to decline balaclavas in the bedroom on a case-by-case basis? Do we really want sex as a pay-per-view circus with Bonnie Blue as ringmaster-in-chief? I suggest we get our disapproving judgements out of the carpark and back on the road.

Mary Harrington is a contributing editor at UnHerd.

moveincircles

Some years back, I was in Sydney during the Jewish High Holidays. On Kol Nidre, the evening beginning Yom Kippur, I went to the Great Synagogue. Guards in full combat gear interrogated, frisked, and wanded the entering congregants.

Several years previously, I’d gone to Shabbat Services in Deauville. The synagogue door was burnt black and blistered from the fire that had been set the previous Yom Kippur, and the shul members decided to preserve it as a reminder. Back in the Seventies, the reminder was constant. Every day we Jews in Chicago and New York saw tattoos on the left arms of our neighbours.

These days, Holocaust Remembrance Ceremonies, however well intentioned, are inert. For, in the Diaspora, young Jews unaffected by antisemitism, and removed from living reminders of outrage, were invited to express sympathy for what were, to them, historical characters. (Israeli Jews, of course, spent and spend entire lives facing the reality of savagery.) We American Jews mouthed “never again”, but did nothing to prevent the reoccurrence. Our comfortable, old-school liberal attitude of “we must change the narrative” was essentially sedative. We did nothing to “change the narrative”. This was not indictable as there was no “narrative”. There was simply the endorphin of permitted brutality.

This year’s Erev-Chanukah, the day before Chanukah, broke with the news of the slaughter of Sydney Jews. That evening, when we first heard of the murder of Rob and Michelle Reiner, we assumed that it was more antisemitic savagery, and, at our Chanukah table, our actual Holocaust Remembrance was that husband-and-wife conference which has been going on intermittently for 2,000 years: “Oh my God, is it time to move…?” The traditional Jewish conference was intermittent as, with most potentially vast changes, it is always too early, save when it is too late.

At its release in 1982, someone wrote of Sophie’s Choice that it was “Mandingo for Jews”. I have always loathed the film subgenre of Jew Porn, allowing folk to feel they are experiencing Good Will for watching actors portray “The Other” being thrown into The Oven.

The inescapable notion that Jews are The Other inspires and allows us to be treated as other-than-human. The crocodile sympathy of moviegoers, and devotees of Anne Frank, Fiddler on the Roof, and so on, is expressed for Jews as victims. And only as victims. The Jew, here, given an award for passivity. Not only is the award moot, it is not even extended to a real Jew.

Forty thousand firearms were taken from the Jews of Warsaw before the Nazis exterminated them. The Jews, of course, hoped to better their position by acquiescence. Hope is the placebo of the powerless. But it is not a strategy.

Violence is a constant and universal possibility. That it can be deterred by Good Feelings was disproved, rather dramatically, by the slaughter of young Israelis at a music festival on October 7.

Some years back I was tasked with taking my niece on a college tour of Brown. The student guide showed us this and that on the beautiful campus, and pointed to a phone kiosk. “There’s one every hundred yards,” he said. “Which will summon our gloriously unarmed Campus Police.”

I thought, at the time, that the University must be a congeries of fools. Not so much as their cops were unarmed (that was, to my mind, simply a dereliction of common sense, understandable in an institution largely engaged in make-believe), but that its representative was selling to prospective buyers, the notion that to be unprotected was laudable — an attitude certainly of interest to the violent. To announce to the world that campus cops were unarmed was merely stupid. To praise that folly was delusion on the order of “changing the narrative”.

A few years back, three Presidents of the Ivy League were called to Congress to testify about their schools’ passivity about antisemitism. Each was asked if the calls on campus for the murder of Jews were antisemitic, and each responded: “it depends on the context.”

Why would any Jewish parents then allow their kids to attend these schools? I’d be pleased to term it a “mystery”; but it is no mystery, it is a horrible passivity — not even the (understandable) dismissal of danger as statistically remote, but something finally much worse — a sort of death wish.

That Jewish parents send their Jewish children to institutions which allow, encourage, and so ensure, antisemitism is an act of sacrifice. It is an endorsement of the majoritarian’s right to oppress the Jews, in the hope the gift will forestall further violence. For the Warsaw Jews it was the surrender of their guns, in the Ivy League, the offer of our children.

These institutions offer Jew-baiting as an extra-curricular activity. What possible benefit could our children derive there which would offset the trauma of their abandonment?

The beleaguered Jewish student there can either embrace passivity as a necessary survival strategy, or — horribly more likely — march with the antisemites calling for the eradication of Israel — an apostasy which would spare them as little as did the Warsaw surrender of firearms.

Jew Hatred isn’t caused by Jews.

The Chanukah celebrants at Bondi Beach, the dancing kids on October 7, the Ivy Jews sheltering in Hillel, neither these nor those they’re persecuted for resembling did anything to inspire hatred. That something in their DNA, appearance, or religious beliefs excuses their persecution is delusional. It’s not a hatred of Jews, but a love of hatred.

Is antisemitic speech and violence a Hate Crime? All crime is hate crime; there is no such thing as Love Crime. To mete out justice based on the ethnic or religious status of the victim or the prejudices of the perpetrator is insanity. We’re all human beings as equal in our legitimate desires for safety as we should be in accountability for our acts.

Jews have been persecuted for 2,000 years because we were defenceless. Since the establishment of the Jewish State, we’ve been reviled because we asserted our right to exist, independent of permission.

Moses fled Egyptian luxury not alone because he slew the taskmaster, but because he was denounced by the Jew he saved. He was heartbroken. After the appearance of Moses, most of the Jews in the Torah plead, scheme, and betray in order to return to Egypt, which is to say, to the security of slavery.

Slavery is the sole possible state of that which the liberal mind celebrates as “equality”. To aspire to it is not merely wrong, it is immoral. For, in preferring subjugation to self-determination, we not only choose for ourselves, but provide example to those groups of which we are members.

My Brown graduate niece, now 43, wears a Free Palestine t-shirt; and the Jews of the world’s largest Jewish city have just elected an antisemite mayor.

On Erev-Chanukah, last Saturday, we neighbourhood Jews gathered, as planned, to light candles. But the day began with the slaughter on Bondi Beach, and ended with the murders of our Community members, the Reiners.

We were grieving, which is to say, in a state of Cognitive Dissonance. Nothing made sense save that nothing made sense. The last thing we wanted to do was to abandon the safety of our grief for a “religious celebration”. Then an elder explained the Miracle of Chanukah.

We all knew that the desecrated Temple had to be rededicated, that the resanctification required illumination of the sacred lamps. We knew, from childhood, that there was Only Enough Oil to burn for one day, but that the Jews lit the lamps and they burned for the required eight days. We all knew the persistence of the lamps was a miracle; but the Rabbis wrote that the true miracle was not the length of the lamps’ illumination, but that the Jews, knowing the oil was insufficient, lit the lamps in any case. As commanded.

After we heard the story, and, still grieving, we lit the lamps.

As Chanukah is, finally, the Festival of Lights, I’ll end with this note: in Sydney, at the Great Synagogue, I was in line, waiting to be frisked, and a man behind me said, “Aren’t you David Mamet?” I admitted I was. He wished me an easy fast, and a Good Inscription in the Book of Life, and said he was honoured I’d come to his shul.

I asked his name, and he told me. He was the shul’s Rabbi. The line had moved up, and the armed guard saw us talking and asked, “Rabbi, shall I just pass him in…?” “Nah,” the Rabbi said, “frisk him.”

Happy Chanukah.

David Mamet is an American playwright, film director, screenwriter and author. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Glengarry Glen Ross.